More than ever before, Sonya now lived for the summer months, when Tanya brought her family to stay. She often felt very lonely, and longed to enjoy herself amongst the bright lights of the big city. She had initially welcomed her husband’s embrace of Russian Orthodoxy, but now he seemed to be losing his exuberant joie de vivre. He seemed to be less and less interested in the family, and also in running the estate. She was not mistaken. Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov in October 1880 that he had been misguided all his adult life by equating goodness first with his aspirations to be awarded the St George Cross, then with the writing of novels and owning land, and finally with having a family, as he now knew that true goodness could only be found in the Gospels.80
In 1880 Tolstoy began to break with old friends and relatives, who were left feeling hurt and confused. In January he went to St Petersburg to hand over the final payment for the land that he had bought, and he went to see Alexandrine the day after he arrived. After telling her he now rejected the divinity of Christ, he had a violent argument with her which lasted all morning, and he returned to continue it that evening, leaving her so agitated she could feel her heart thumping in her chest. After being unable to sleep that night, Tolstoy then left Petersburg first thing the next morning, and Alexandrine felt deeply wounded that he did not come to say goodbye.81 Tolstoy’s sister Masha also became intensely religious at this time, but her spiritual journey took her in the opposite direction, deep into the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Her only son Nikolay had married in October 1878, with Tolstoy as best man, but the following summer, just as her illegitimate daughter Elena was finishing her education in Switzerland and Masha was preparing to bring her to settle in Russia, he died of typhoid.82 It was a terrible blow for Masha, from which she never really recovered. Instead, under the spiritual guidance of Elder Ambrosy at Optina Pustyn, she became more and more devout, and eventually in 1888 she decided to become a nun. After a stint in a convent in Tula, she settled in a convent near to Optina Pustyn, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Masha remained close to her brother, but they had no common ground when it came to religion.
It took a while for Tolstoy’s friends to acclimatise to his new state of mind. Nothing seemed to be able to faze Strakhov, but the deeply religious Sergey Urusov could not accept Tolstoy’s new views, which he regarded as heretical, and their friendship foundered. Tolstoy’s friendship with Afanasy Fet also disintegrated. Ironically, it was just when Tolstoy decided he wanted to abandon belles-lettres under the influence of his new religious views that his fiction began to become available to the French and English-speaking worlds. The combined Childhood and Youth appeared in English in 1862,83 but it was not until Eugene Schuyler published his translation of The Cossacks in 1878 that there was anything else available by Tolstoy. Turgenev’s friend, the Russian specialist and translator William Ralston, was rebuffed by Tolstoy when he wrote to him asking for biographical information in preparation for an article he was writing about him in October 1878.84 ‘I cannot partake the temporary illusion of some friends of mine, which seem to be sure, that my works must occupy some place in the Russian literature,’ Tolstoy wrote back in decorous but distinctly Russian English to Mr Ralston’s address in Bedford Square, London. ‘Quite sincerely not knowing, if my works shall be read after 100 years, or will be forgotten in 100 days,’ he continued, ‘I do not wish to take a ridiculous part in the very probable mistake of my friends.’85 Ralston filled in the blanks with the help of Turgenev, and published his pioneering article on ‘Count Leo Tolstoy’s Novels’ in 1879. For the subject of Anna Karenina, Ralston wrote, Tolstoy had chosen ‘society as it exists at the present day in Russian aristocratic circles, combining with his graphic descriptions of the life now led by the upper classes, a series of subtle studies of an erring woman’s heart.’
Ralston was right on the mark in claiming Anna Karenina had made more money for its author than any other previous work of Russian literature, but some way off it when he speculated that Anna Karenina and War and Peace were unlikely to be translated into English.86 In fact, the first French translation of War and Peace had already appeared in the same year as his article, and it had been this momentous event which prompted Turgenev to promote Tolstoy as a great novelist in his letter to Edmond About in January 1880. English translations soon followed. In May 1880, Turgenev came to spend a couple of days at Yasnaya Polyana. It was now three years since Tolstoy had finished Anna Karenina, and he had published nothing new since. Turgenev was hopeful that his friend would come back to fiction. He was also hoping he could persuade Tolstoy to take part in the Pushkin celebrations in Moscow the following month, but he was to be disappointed on both counts. Probably about the only thing they agreed on now was hunting, for which they still shared a passion.
While it is hard to imagine Tolstoy standing beside Dostoyevsky and Turgenev to honour Russia’s first truly great writer at this stage in his career, his refusal does in retrospect look a little churlish. The occasion for the celebrations was the unveiling of the first statue of Pushkin in Russia. It was scandalous that it had not happened sooner (Pushkin died in 1837), but none of the nineteenth-century tsars was prepared to sanction the official veneration of a rebellious and subversive poet fatally wounded in a duel. What was therefore important about this statue is that it was paid for entirely by public subscription, and its unveiling was a cause for celebration precisely because it had nothing to do with the government. The fact that Turgenev came especially from Paris for the occasion, and that Dostoyevsky, who was gravely ill, broke off writing The Brothers Karamazov at his country house south of Novgorod to come and take part, speaks eloquently about the importance of this occasion as a public event, which lasted for four days and was widely seen as a triumph for the Russian intelligentsia, and for Russian culture generally. As Turgenev said in his speech, the whole of educated Russia had in some way contributed to the erection of the statue, and this was a sign of its love for one of its greatest fellow countrymen. It was Pushkin, he proclaimed, who had completed the final refinement of ‘our language, which in its richness, force, logic and beauty of form is acknowledged by even foreign philologists to be the best after ancient Greek’. Pushkin, he said, ‘spoke with typical images, and immortal sounds embracing all aspects of Russian life’. Tolstoy did not care much for ‘educated Russia’, and now scorned the intelligentsia, and yet he was in some ways biting the hand which had fed him, for as a writer he too owed an enormous debt to Pushkin.
Turgenev’s rhetoric was nothing compared to Dostoyevsky’s messianic identification of Pushkin with Russia and Christ, which was greeted by an ecstatic thirty-minute ovation. Writing to his wife afterwards, Dostoyevsky told her ‘strangers in the audience were weeping, sobbing, embracing one another, and swearing to one another to be better, not to hate each other in the future, but to love’. Even Turgenev was moved to embrace his old opponent.87 Tolstoy was at this very moment immersed in Christ’s teaching of brotherly love, as he had begun to coordinate and translate the Gospels, but his ego would never have permitted him to join in the communal rejoicing at this extraordinary, unparalleled event. Many years later he explained that, much as he valued Pushkin’s genius, he had not gone to Moscow because he felt there was something unnatural about such celebrations, something, which, while not exactly false, did not meet his ‘emotional requirements’.88